Sweden warns over injecting rooms

Australia should go for heroin injecting rooms only if it wanted to ensure addicts remained addicted, a Swedish expert said yesterday.

One hundred delegates, from addicts to academics, have gathered in Perth for a five-day drugs summit to formulate recommendations on areas from treatment to law enforcement.

Keynote speakers told of the Swiss and Swedish drug policies, saying heroin rooms were successful in Switzerland but would never be tolerated in Sweden, with its "restrictive" drug policy aimed at zero use.

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"If the government gives heroin to a heroin addict, that heroin will have exactly the same effect - or maybe even better, because the government would like to put out pure heroin - as that provided by an illegal dealer," he said.

"So there's no difference really. What it will do is make sure the heroin addict is kept addicted, and if that is what you want to achieve, well, of course, you should use heroin (injecting rooms)."

Martin Hosek, from the Swiss Public Health department, said injecting rooms had been successful since their introduction in 1988, and 11 now operated in five Swiss cities. Fifty-fiveper cent of Swiss people voted favorably in a 1999 referendum for a heroin-prescription program to continue as a "last-treatment option" for severe addicts.

The programs contrast with Sweden, which promotes compulsory treatment for young addicts and opposes programs under which one drug is replaced with another, such as methadone.

Mr Hosek said Swiss programs aimed to get addicts into treatment, to stabilise them in areas of health and social integration and, in the long term, get them off drugs.

Up to 75 per cent of addicts stayed in the schemes after the first year, Mr Hosek said. Criminality of 80 per cent of the patients dropped from 70 per cent to 10 after 18 months, and 75 per cent of people who quit heroin-assisted treatments went either into withdrawal or on to methadone maintenance.

Mr Hosek said there was considerable public resistance to heroin injecting rooms when trials were proposed.

"But the public was also suffering from the open drug scenes - from the dealing, the violence, the criminal activity of the dealers - so the public was convinced something had to be done," he said.

Mr Peterson said "it would be political suicide in Sweden to even propose" heroin distribution or injecting rooms because there had been complete bipartisan agreement for 35 years to keep illicit drugs out of society. "There's no way drugs would be made legal in our country," he said.

Sweden conducted a three-year non-scientific trial of opiate and amphetamine distribution in 1965 but this was stopped in 1967 after the deaths of two teenage girls.

The Western Australian Government is expected to respond to the summit's recommendations by October 19.